Hydrodynamics with chiral anomaly and charge separation in relativistic heavy ion collisions

Matter with chiral fermions is microscopically described by theory with quantum anomaly and macroscopically described (at low energy) by anomalous hydrodynamics. For such systems in the presence of external magnetic field and chirality imbalance, a charge current is generated along the magnetic field direction --- a phenomenon known as the Chiral Magnetic Effect (CME). The quark-gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy ion collisions provides an (approximate) example, for which the CME predicts a charge separation perpendicular to the collisional reaction plane. Charge correlation measurements designed for the search of such signal have been done at RHIC and the LHC for which the interpretations, however, remain unclear due to contamination by background effects that are collective flow driven, theoretically poorly constrained, and experimentally hard to separate. Using anomalous (and viscous) hydrodynamic simulations, we make a first attempt at quantifying contributions to observed charge correlations from both CME and background effects in one and same framework. The implications for the search of CME are discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Published version in Phys. Lett.

Charge redistribution from novel magneto-vorticity coupling in anomalous hydrodynamics

We discuss new transport phenomena in the presence of both a strong magnetic field and a vortex field. Their interplay induces a charge distribution and a current along the magnetic field. We show that the associated transport coefficients can be obtained from a simple analysis of the single-particle distribution functions and also from the Kubo formula calculation. The consistent results from these analyses suggest that the transport coefficients are tied to the chiral anomaly in the (1+1) dimension because of the dimensional reduction in the lowest Landau levels.Comment: Contribution to the proceedings of Quark Matter 2017 in Chicag

CMB Cold Spot from Inflationary Feature Scattering

We propose a "feature-scattering" mechanism to explain the cosmic microwave background cold spot seen from WMAP and Planck maps. If there are hidden features in the potential of multi-field inflation, the inflationary trajectory can be scattered by such features. The scattering is controlled by the amount of isocurvature fluctuations, and thus can be considered as a mechanism to convert isocurvature fluctuations into curvature fluctuations. This mechanism predicts localized cold spots (instead of hot ones) on the CMB. In addition, it may also bridge a connection between the cold spot and a dip on the CMB power spectrum at $\ell \sim 20$.Comment: 17 pages, 17 figures, Nuclear Physics B in pres